Need for Speed: Undercover - Producer Interview

Interview with John Doyle, Producer of Need for Speed: Undercover

We got to talk to John Doyle, the producer for the upcoming Need for Speed: Undercover, at this year’s GCA event in Singapore. Amongst the noisy show floor, we tried our hand at the new game, and kept crashing into head-on traffic in our attempt to avoid the cops.

Here are a few things that John had to say about the game, and the development process behind it.

About the game:

John: The game’s been in development for about 20 months or so. We’re about four weeks away from going gold right now.

This game is the spiritual successor to Most Wanted, with awesome cop chases and things like that.

About 150 kilometres of road

The sandbox nature:

John: You can just drive around wherever you want, and you can always hit a button to enter the nearest mission. Or you can just head to the map and select a mission. They’ll be unlocked in areas, and you’ll work towards defeating all the game’s bosses.

The new Highway Battle mode:

John: Highway Battle is our new mode. It’s just you and another car, and the goal is to get 1,000 feet in front of the other one. The traffic here is all random. The cars have quite a sophisticated AI that swerves and panics when you come at them. So every time you play, it’s a different feel.

There are two main ways to win – you can either try and zip through the traffic and outpace your opponent, or you can try and cause as much havoc with other cars as possible, which will hopefully slow him down.

The game’s engine:

John: The game uses the ProStreet engine, but it won’t feel anything like ProStreet. We’ve ramped up the arcade-y feeling – we wanted to make it more movie-like. So there are plenty of cool moves we wanted you to do, from drifting to 360 degree turns. We wanted to make it take about five minutes before you felt like a pro driving around.

There are about 120 events in the game, with about 20-30 hours of gameplay just completing the main ones.

On customisation:

John: It’s much simpler than ProStreet – the focus is on easily making your car look cool. There are tons of different styles, and you can do an awful lot with it. We wanted to make it a lot easier to tweak things, and worked hard to smooth out the customization interface.

Challenges:

John: It’s been a pretty complex game to build. The most challenging thing was getting the cops back in, and actually having an open world in there again.

The game comes out mid-November – keep an eye out for our review around then!